Voices on Joyce gathers together interpretations of Joyce's work by scholars in a wide span of disciplines: music, history, literature, philosophy, sport, geography, modern languages, economics, theatre studies and law. The depth and range of James Joyce's relationship with key historical, intellectual and cultural issues in the early twentieth century are explored, including: the growth of Dublin as a city, the advance of Irish separatist nationalism, criminal trials in late nineteenth-century Ireland, the influence of Classical authors such as Aristotle and Ovid, the Irish Literary Revival, the value of operatic music, notions of the aesthetic and of a democratic readership, and the history and social import of Jewish communities and traditions. The twenty essays in this collection draw out the openness and pluralism of Joyce's writing and underscore the need for readings of his work from a large variety of diverging perspectives. The wide ranging voices in this collection are composed by present and former UCD academics, and constitute a unique reckoning with the legacy of Joyce by members of his alma mater.A portrait of Joyce emerges as a writer deeply embedded in Irish intellectual discourses and as a figure of vital on-going importance in the social and cultural debates of twenty-first century Ireland.
Photos interleaving the essays by the modernist and photojournalist, Lee Miller, taken in Dublin in 1946, provide vivid images of Joycean locations and of their artistic reimagining.